Chapter VI: Part 6

He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered your aura.”

“Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?”

“As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.”

“You mean—no body?”

“No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest you? Is it a point of any importance?”

But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’”

“But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting. I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.” His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination, unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.”

“Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured, unsympathetically.

“Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in the gliding swifts.

“I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals, vampires.”

“It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky. “The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.”

“It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland. Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s sorrow, so smug.”

She spoke to the bamboo grove. “And so clean. And everyone is so happy. And inspiration only comes to you when you are in an untidy, poverty stricken, romantic country where the people are superstitious and incompetent. In your Paradise everyone must be Celtic and ridiculous. To be poetical, to have beautiful fancies and run to press with them is diseased. You dress up the cold substance of experience with starry crowns and gauze wings to make it look like fairies. A country should produce either men who can think straight or men who can live hard—especially the first. That is what compels me in a man.”

The wild anger that flashed in his eyes died down when she suddenly turned her face.

“There is distress in your eyes, not scorn.” His concern became apparent in a disposition to offer her the protection of his bosom.

At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she had seen her home, and the pull at her was agonizing. The elm-clump beyond the sea of bamboo was an island of the familiar in a sea of strangeness. She suffered an intolerable desire for England, for the Georgian house, for the tennis-lawns, the stables, the cornfields. Her nerves stormed for the satisfaction that those old habits could give, and her more complex desire for the undefined satisfaction that she was pursuing in the Peach-blossom Valley all but suffered shipwreck. But she gave no hint of this to the poet. He was friendly to her, but because he loved her she must put him far away, increasing her isolation. They sat in stillness and silence while the blazing summer sun sank down the afternoon sky and the swifts mounted and swerved and flickered high up over the elms.

37

At evening, when the sky was a flaming garden in the glass of the Lake, Ambrose and Lychnis sat side by side in a punt at a distant part of the shore, quietly fishing. Their punt was moored by two poles. Behind them a wall of reeds; before them the green reflection; a step beyond it the sky mirrored in an abyss. They were fishing for pike, perch and the like.

“Yes, it had been decided to return,” he replied to a question, “until Sprot disappeared. It is not known whether he went back to the _Floating Leaf_ or whether—— Do you, perhaps, know what has become of him?”

“I haven’t a notion.” She hooked a gudgeon of suitable size through the appropriate membrane and cast her line. “Until it is known, I suppose, my father will stay on. I mean, he wouldn’t desert even Sprot. In any case I do not think he will go back just yet.”

Ambrose lifted his eyes for a moment from his float to glance at her—a reed-fairy with amber robe and amber hair, steadily holding her rod with slender hands, frowning at the float that bobbed in the ripples. She was a novice at fishing. It was certainly accurate to describe her as a most lovely young woman. The meaning of her words would no doubt be given presently. She had clearly brought him here to deliver it.

“They can’t bear it any more because Hsiao’s death doesn’t make any difference to Yuan and Wang. Why, Ambrose?”

“You know why. You have grasped the principle. They cherish the personality, and cannot endure the indifference to personality that Yuan and Wang display.”

“Yes,” she responded; “I do know. They cannot bear to think that they are of no more importance than a grain of dust, or a slug, or a tomato. What do you think about personality?”

“The strange thing about it is,” he pointed out, “that Wang and Yuan, who ignore it, have more of it. It is a strange truth. But we understand—do we not?—that the personality is not their own. They merely contain, as it were, something cosmical, something that streams and emanates from them.”

“It has the effect, merely, of personality,” she observed. “But it is very fascinating.”

“You find it so?”

“My float has gone.” It had disappeared in the clouds that seemed to drift under it.

“Don’t strike for a few seconds,” he put in. “It’s pike. They run off with the bait and begin to swallow it afterwards. Now!”

She struck.

“Don’t pull,” he continued. “Hold gently when you can.”

“I feel it,” she gasped. “I’m in communication. It’s wonderful to feel the weight of something in a world you can’t see.”

By a method of her own the fish was got into the boat. “It’s a pike,” said Ambrose, “but with improvements of Yuan’s.”

“Yes, I find Yuan fascinating,” she continued, when she had cast her line again.

“You are in love with him?”

“Must you put it in the diary? If he were a figure on a vase ... if he would behave as such after marriage ... I don’t know if I am in love. That’s what I have to find out. I couldn’t go away without finding out, could I? I must find out. Nothing else matters, and that is the sole reason why I am making so much trouble—not intellectual curiosity, or friendship, or anything like that, but simply an unanswerable desire to understand what is happening to me. At present it’s like this—I can’t do without him. I feel I must always be in his presence, watching him, hearing him. Is that love?”

“It is foolish,” said Ambrose, “to ask ourselves ‘Is she in love?’ We have no definition of love. We do not know what it is. This is the only question we need put, in the case before us: ‘Is your desire towards him strong enough, and more especially single enough, to decide you to make an experiment with him that would create a situation complex enough to be awkward from the point of view of some of the parties less intimately, but to an important extent, concerned?’”

“Yes, that is the question we ought to put,” she agreed. “The answer is——”

But he was momentarily engaged in pulling a fine red perch of about six pounds out of the water. He landed it, and they bent over the tank, to watch it swimming about in company with her improved pike.

“The answer,” she resumed, gazing at his image in the tank, “is that she doesn’t know, but she has made up her mind that the only way to find out is to live in conditions similar to those which would obtain if the whole experiment were in hand, and with this object she proposes to accept an invitation extended to her some time back and live on the island for a little while in close company with Wang and Yuan, sharing quarters with two or three of the Chinese girls. Is that the kind of answer you like? The kind of sentence, I should say.” They left the tank and went back to their rods. Brown shadows of night were now lurking in the luxuriant summer foliage of the valley.

“At any rate it leaves me clear as to your meaning.” He fitted out his hook with a fresh gudgeon. “You intend to pursue your experience, if necessary to the last conclusion?”

“Well—nobody could blame me if I did.”

“Nobody could, but plenty would. It is the custom to blame people who put things to the test for themselves.”

“You would not blame me?”

“Praise and blame do seem so profoundly irrelevant. Was that a bite? No. It is getting too dark to see. The chief point is that at present you are not sure. You will go near the terrible fruit of knowledge, but will you pluck it?”

“You see inside of me, Ambrose. I like it. Yes, there is perhaps something I cannot get over. I don’t know if I loathe that, or whether I like it. Perhaps you can tell me which. Or ... or what it would be like ... if something would make it ... easy.”

Her speech did not often falter. This little hard grain of knowledge in regard to physical facts she still hesitated to put to the test of experience. The unilluminated fact discomposed her.

“That statement you were to prepare for me...?”

He smiled to himself in the gathering brown darkness. “I am afraid it is not quite ready.”

The night fell swiftly at last, faintly lit by a moon still low down among the hills, like a lotus among great brown petals. Both felt the weight of a fish when they went to put away rod and line. Soon all was packed up, and Ambrose rowed the punt slowly away.

“You will put me on the island?” she asked.

“Certainly.”

“And tell my father?—explain to him?”

“I will.”

“And remain my friend when they all misunderstand and hate me?”

“Why, yes.”

“What a darling you are!”

He records that when he put her ashore on the Rock she kissed him and wept. He rowed the punt slowly back through the lanes in the water-lily leaves.

38

Lychnis made her way through its main gates into the walled collection of courtyards and one-storied houses where the relatives of old Wang and Yuan lived. During many days spent on the island she had made acquaintance with numbers of them, and now they gave her an eager welcome, overjoyed that the fair-haired and fairy-like stranger should have accepted their invitation. But her first night, alone with two Chinese girls in the lanterned chamber, was strange. They chattered to her in a speech like the speech of birds; they rolled themselves up fantastically on their queer beds; and, kind and affectionate with her as they might be, she lay shaking by herself in the darkness, unutterably alone.

With morning there were many things, apart from the pursuit of her enterprise, to fill her mind. It was amusing to watch her companions plastering their hair down with resin. Other young women came in to assist at her toilet, some dressed, as was more usual among them, in the ordinary costume of a Chinese girl; others, for the sake of pleasing her, or because it was their custom, in robes copied from the fashions of many centuries. An embarrassing interest was shown in her affairs. They offered her a quantity of clothes to choose from, and watched her with delighted and confusion-producing comment while she managed the combination she effected of her own soft underclothes with robe and trousers in heliotrope and green. They laughed over her. She pleased them.

After breakfast, when she was introduced to some gentle elder women, she was taken by four or five of her friends to a room with an effect, in the clear morning heat, of pink and pale green and gold. There were elaborate chairs, Chinese books, a chessboard in ebony and amber, a stringed instrument (which later she learned to play), two or three landscapes on silk, objects in ivory and jade and unknown precious metals. An attempt was made at conversation of an explanatory kind.

The youngest of them—a demure, slender girl, who bent and twisted her body with the grace of a willow in the wind—indicated names, such as Golden Apricot, Blue Lotus, or Scarlet Moth. Then she put a question: “Married?”

“Not married,” Lychnis replied.

“Those two married,” the child indicated, pointing to an elaborate, indolent beauty, and a girl with a sad, intelligent face. “Hsiao’s wives.”

Lychnis was shocked. They seemed so young for that hideous painter, and it was tactless of the child to have introduced the subject. The beauty smiled secretly, as if she had some fountain, and no mystical one, of consolation, and the sad one wrung her hands. It was to be gathered that the reactions of these two young widows were of the human kind, not like those of their extraordinary relatives.

It occurred to Lychnis to ask whether Yuan was married. It came to her that he might have a wife or two wives. There was an exasperating titter. “Yuan!” Two or three shaped their mouths to his name, producing an effect as if they were astonished, or scandalized, or contemptuous—she could not tell what.

Then the beauty spoke—in English, surprisingly: “Yuan not a man—neither is Wang Li.”

“You mean?”

But she would do no more than smile, and Lychnis leaned back on her apple-green cushion, angrily wondering how to find out what she meant. Was it meant that Yuan was a spirit, or ghost? A Yuan that was a ghost might be more agreeable in the capacity of husband. She suddenly felt, among these matter-of-fact and human young women, and there came with it a dismaying sense of unreality, that she must have been dreaming about some porcelain image in a museum or a figure on a scroll.

“Are you sad that Yuan is not a man?” asked the beauty, with quite European cattishness.

“How well you speak English!” Lychnis graciously replied, desirous of friendly relations.

At this also there was a titter, and the demure child explained with readiness and a remarkable virtuosity in the method of allusion that her lovely cousin had learnt this and more from Quentin.

Lychnis closed her eyes, not caring to learn whether the slender young lady had also learnt at the same knee. Quentin, in his hateful irresponsibility, she savagely reflected, knew no restraints. But how would it be to spend the rest of her life among these twittering golden mice? The sad one, the intelligent one, perhaps she would not lightly permit herself what seemed to Lychnis to require the profound assent of reason and imagination. Yuan might take her away, of course. She suffered a wave of anger that he did not come.

39

Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back, sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags; and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.

She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards, contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees. Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt; the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel. They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure, that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness; their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth. Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.

Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand, the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks, brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark, lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds, sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light, with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves. She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty; she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness, nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.” A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but the experience of it brought joy.

And dimly, only dimly, she felt Yuan beside her in the sea of forest thoughts, leaf thoughts, as if he guided her where she floated. In the apprehension of him, in that realm of experience, there was no distaste. She felt closer to him when her senses were submerged. She was where there are no distinctions of this and that.

Her thoughts were broken into by spoken words. The Rishi were coming to the end of their contemplation, and they returned to the world in a state of unhuman gaiety. There still sounded in them the mirth of the Paradise where they had been.

Their gaiety abruptly came to an end. “There are two imperfect beings in contemplation with us,” said the demon of wrath.

“One,” added the newt, “is very imperfect, being full of half-thoughts, and even whole thoughts, and long pauses of irrelevant dreaming. Those who have thoughts in their minds should not gather round the smoke of incense.”

“The other,” contributed the third, “is nearly thoughtless, nearly unconscious; but he impedes the flow of reality into himself and among us by some attachment to the passions and desires of men.”

“A brother!” piped the newt, with a gurgle of newt-like laughter, “an immortal, has drowned the never-ending merriment of the immortals in a draught of red and serious desire!”

Yuan did not change countenance, but he drew her away, and they were followed as they went down the rocky path among the birches by sounds of immense hilarity. This is the life he is destined for by family tradition, reflected Lychnis, and he is to become like these, though not so ugly.

His conversation on the way down was somewhat of that which is more important than desire and life, beside which human pleasure is insignificant. “Those,” he said, explaining the point of view of his three acquaintances, “who have once found the satisfaction of non-being desire it, and they shun the things that belong to existence, as, for example, friendship and love.”

That might not be inconvenient, in some circumstances, was the thought that presented itself to her attention. It came forcibly at first, then faded in a myriad quivering forest thoughts, at the heart of which, in a radiation of light and power, through a wisp of the smoke of incense, the image of the porcelain saint eternally smiled. An unearthly smile, it was, without scorn and without pity—a smile that made all human experience seem irrelevant, and all human language conceited.

40

At the height of summer the rains came; the fiery flowers and the fantastic hills were extinguished in a blur of rain, in a steam and smell of rain throughout the valley, in clouds of rain drifting among the crags, arrows of rain slanting across the Lake.

For a day or two Yuan and Lychnis stayed at home, amusing themselves in the laboratories, talking in the library, studying paintings on silk, handling bronzes and porcelain, looking out at the rain. They had plenty to say and do, but the deluge had a voice for Lychnis, and she desired to feel the drench on her body, to be enveloped in the embrace of warm rain. The third day, therefore, they took a punt and a cormorant, and went fishing, with only the protection of a flat umbrella, she in her glass-green silk, he in his hunting costume of russet-brown with a note of crimson. Forthwith they were gasping under the minute insistent drive of the myriad rain arrows. They made their way down the squelching path, among dripping laurels, to the shore.

She laughed. “We are in the power of the rain. It’s delicious.” And he smiled back, knowing how softly and surely the rain prevails.

“See,” he called, “the subject for a picture—Rain on a Sheet of Water and Ducks swimming under a Willow.”

They found their punt, and she remembers the touch of his wet hand as he helped her on board. They pushed off, and the rain fell steadily and softly all about them. The sky was full of grey, swirling veils; pale, driving gusts swept the leaves and the white lilies. The shore receded, there was a blur of willows in a slant of rain, a glimpse of rock like a grey core of rain, and then they were together in a warm, misty oblivion.

Lychnis put up her face to the soft downpour, taking warm caresses on her eyes, in her mouth. The rain drenched her, soaked into her hair, smoothed the silk robe to her body so that she seemed stripped, blinded her, beat her, knew every part of her, and prevailed. She felt shameless and searching caresses down back and limbs, between her breasts and over her torso, on knees and feet. The rain was possessing her, but the face of the rain that watched her was Yuan’s. She held up her mouth to the down-drenching lover, saying, “I adore you.”

The voice of Yuan replied, “Water-lily.” He was regarding her, she realized, with a keen gaze, more than ordinarily prolonged and remorseless. He held her with his gaze, as if he admitted, now, a special relation between them, and wished her to admit it, too. Close to her, shut in by the changing wall of rain, he seemed big and immediate, like a god, like the rain-god. His features, his yellow skin, his piercing eyes, the slash of crimson on his brown tunic—sole note of colour in a drifting, grey universe—had a terrifying distinctness. He was very close and real and living, though his life—the life behind his unreadable eyes—was not the life of men. Perhaps because it was not Yuan who looked at her, but the swirling rain, not Yuan, but the voice of the universe who spoke, distaste for his flesh vanished. Yuan was dissolved and received into the body of the rain, and she desired him. Past and future vanished; all else was shut out; there was no earth or heaven—only herself in a space of warm, saturating water, floating on water; herself, a cormorant with a fish, and the god of the universe. In his eyes, deep and unreadable and fascinating like the black lake-water, she was about to drown.

He came towards her. She felt her hands taken. The face, impending, intent, was close to hers. The mouth, a calm flower in the rain, was stretched out to her.

She offered herself to the terror of his mouth and the fierce and shining infinity that looked out of his eyes. There was no person in them, only a stupendous power. Yuan had vanished; what held her was not Yuan. Her own body, her own person, seemed also to dissolve and stream away in the rain. There was a sudden blinding drive, a hurricane embrace of rain, and in the midst of it his small mouth was a spot of fire.

41

Next day they climbed up among the crags in gusty weather, and as evening drew on they were overtaken by a shower. There was a mountain temple by a torrent in the shadow of a rock. They crossed the torrent by a bridge and took shelter.

While Yuan contemplated a bronze image of Kwannon, Lychnis looked out at the crags, the pines, the valley below where the torrent fell booming. Far away was the Lake and the island in a mist of rain. Or sometimes she watched Yuan. She had abandoned everything to him, and waited for what he might be about to command. She was living in the intoxication of what seemed an unending now, and made no conjectures as to what might happen when now ended.

All day their talk had been of the regions where he had taken her with the power of his mind (and where she had followed easily), of tree life, of insect life (a weird region), of chill regions beyond, out of which life takes origin. This seemed to her cold talk for lovers, and she fancied she was ready that it should become warmer.

She called to him: “Yuan.”

His voice answered from within: “Lychnis.”

“We are like the gods up here. Down there I see the world, where Wang Li is.” Her mind did not admit the thought of others on the far side of the Lake.

“Do the gods live for ever, and are they eternally happy?” she asked. Her thoughts were all of an immense duration of happiness in some illimitable space of light, with dim shapes of mountains and pavilions. But a shadow fell across her mind, an annihilating thought of a cessation, of a space of nothing, of her lover wilfully dissolving in emptiness, deliberately ceasing to be.

At her question, a swift, stony chill seemed to pass across his face. “Your question has no relation to reality,” he coldly replied.

“I know you think it,” she answered. “I see quite well that it is absurd. You have made me understand that life is relative and all that. But it is a queer thought for a woman in love. My brains have all gone, you see, because of it, and I—the I that is the living Lychnis, and this body—clamour to be recognized.”

She had not spoken to him or to herself so boldly before, but the thought of what he was always calling the eternal, non-existing Lychnis, with no body for caresses, the Lychnis pre-existent in a state precedent to matter and intelligence and life, was not congenial to her. But was she ready for an alternative? At once her words presented their own meaning clearly to her mind, and she experienced a terror that she chose to find delicious. There he was, tall and brooding, near her in the gloom of the evening. She was ready to think of herself as having been seized, as captive to the masked, expressionless god.

A gust of wind boomed in the roof of the hut.

“It is chilly here,” she said. “Are we going away to-night to the forests in the south, where it is so warm?”

He stood close to her, and her orchid-petal hands lay in his. She divined a formidable debate in his mind, and wished that she could have read the eyes that gazed past her through the window. If he did not take her to the forests.... If they stayed here.... This might become her bridal chamber. She let the thought take her fully, and in the face of reality looked through the window for an escape. There was only rain and frowning crags and the valley, and perhaps the shadow of a picture of someone far off who could have given her advice. The bridal chamber! She was happy as she was, after all, in a now that might as well be unending, and perhaps, if she was to be possessed by Yuan, it would have to be in the glow of that moment of assent in the rain-world, now somewhat past.

He made no reply to her thoughts. With him it was crisis. He chose the flowering moment of desire to show his contempt for it. Most probably the moments of silence were an eternity of the anguish of renunciation.

“Is anything the matter?” She caught some faint shadow of dismay on the strong mask of his visage. “Are you displeased?”

There was no answer. There had been a change in Yuan, like the change that comes over a man at the moment of death. Her breath troubled her, and she beat in terror at the gates of his mind. “Oh, Yuan! Yuan! Answer for pity’s sake!” But he had closed the gates of his mind against her for ever. She stormed, now, to come in, to be his, to accept the whole sequel of her actions, to accept the experience to which she had given herself in its entirety. But the experience had committed treason against her; she was forsaken of God.

“Oh what has happened? What is the matter?” she pleaded. “Why have you gone cold to me?” But she pleaded with a porcelain idol in a dark mountain temple. Her lands still lay in his like lilies in the hands of an image. She tore them away, and took hold of the window-sill and bowed her head into them and sobbed, until the fear of the universe that had turned mercilessly against her silenced even her sobbing with its formidable cold. Then there was a movement on the still face of the image; the god put out a ray of protection against the terror that threatened to overwhelm her, but he left her without refuge from her grief and dismay. She was to face that, he seemed cruelly to determine, unaided.

After a time he touched her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow him. She went after him into the twilight garden behind the temple, and there he plucked a peach from a little tree and bade her eat it. “This fruit,” he said, “is only for the favoured of God when they have become fitted to endure deep experiences.”

Saying this he walked away, and she followed him across the torrent, homeward through rain that beat her now and loved her no more. He held his face from her. Once, indeed, he turned to her suddenly, and she seemed, almost against credence, to see an expression of suffering. But before it had gained a hold even on her memory it was gone, and he strode on again.

42

The oppressive heat of summer was over, and during the still nights when the lotus fades Lychnis heard of the wild geese flying southward. She saw nothing of Yuan for nine days. But entering the summer pavilion among the tree-tops one brilliant night of autumn she found him seated cross-legged on the floor, in a haze of moonlight, ragged, bare-chested, in a rapt meditation. He made no sign of having perceived her. She sat herself down in his neighbourhood and waited, recognizing in the moonlight—ghostly remembrance of summer sunshine she was used to there—details of the bleached, airswept room. Her eyes were drawn to the space of vast, shimmering sky in the door. A branch of pine thrust across that space, she remembers, and she watched the delicate shadow of the pine-branch swaying slightly on the bare floor, travelling remorselessly like time towards the idol seated by the doorway. He was so still that soon she believed herself to be dreaming.

When at last a voice issued from his profound immobility she felt the assault of terror, as if a phantom had spoken. “There is an imperfect being in contemplation with me,” the figure said.

“It is I, Lychnis,” she answered meekly.

He seemed scarcely aware of her. He was indeed dead in the body. “An echo reaches me. A voice that spoke once in the world of unreality.” His tones were the high, uncertain tones of a spirit. He turned his face, and it was illuminated by an unearthly brilliance. It was like talking with a god enthroned in a ghostly radiance of the night sky, and the floor between them seemed a gulf of interstellar space.

“Here on this lonely earth,” she answered, “speaks a mouth you have kissed.”

“What do you desire of me?”

“I desire to talk about ourselves and about love.” She was suddenly sharp and insistent. One sees her seated on a cushion, her head bent attentively towards him, or hanging somewhat like a child’s, and when her head was hanging like that, one learns, it was because she had become aware of a new, surprising element—an element of disrespect.

“Ourselves? Love? Self and love are renounced and forgotten, or if remembered they are the remembered pain of some past life.” He spoke like a dreamer in paradise, unwilling to wake.

“That is taking things very seriously,” she said, speaking thoughts that astonished her as they came into her mind. “Perhaps, after all, love is not a thing to be taken so seriously.” A quiver of pain troubled her as she said it, remembering what delights she had thought to obtain from life and love.

Did he stir in his cave of radiance? “The moment of love is past. It was perfect, and needs no addition. In any sense that is not tedious it lives forever, and may be continually enjoyed by those who live in the blissful regions of non-being. The personal in love is nothing.”

“All the same,” she put in, “it is delicious.”

“In love,” he repeated, “there is one moment that is eternal. As in art there is a moment of perfect balance, which cannot be added to or diminished without ruin, so in love.”

“Then,” she said, mocking, “I am for promiscuity. The more moments the better.”

“But the delights of the lover and the artist,” he replied, “if they could be prolonged for ever, would not be worth even a hint of the experience of non-being.”

Alongside this verbal exchange, alongside the mockery that had come so unexpectedly to life in her mind, she was hurt with images of days they had spent together. She resumed: “I will not talk mockery. Let us be plain about the issue. We loved. We experienced the beginnings of a perfect life together. You have broken it. You have made a renunciation in accordance with the tradition of your family. You have sacrificed me to attain your queer paradise. I want you to satisfy me that it was right to do so.”

He said nothing for a long time. She thought that he might reply with questions: whether they had indeed loved; whether their life together would have remained perfect; whether, indeed, there had not been already a hesitation on her part. Then he spoke:

“The supreme experience of the senses is the renunciation of love.”

This did not seem to her an answer. She still waited, and soon he spoke again, looking steadily out through the doorway into the space of moonlight. His face was frozen and pure. “Do you still trouble my peace?”

“I grieve for our beautiful ruined love. I cannot, cannot forget it.”

His tones fell now with strange modulations, and there came to her cadences of the flute he played to her in the forest. “The shadow of the pine-branch travels across the floor, reaches my foot, passes over my body, but does not enter me. It is thus with the memory of love. It is thus also with the memory of the world. Around me, when I was a boy, I saw a world of rock and grass and blue sky. Then, when I had meditated on these, and perceived the secret life of water-meadow, torrent and flower, the seen world dissolved. Rock and grass became vaporous like the sky. I saw trees like apparitions, landscapes of shifting smoke, mountains of mist beyond mountains of mist melting endlessly away into an infinite horizon of æther. The world became a contemplation in the smoke of incense. It has gone, and now I meditate on what has taken its place. I am possessed of what is greater than joy. I have come into the calm of nothingness, into the lightless and ineffable regions of non-being, where there is neither splendour nor darkness. It is an ecstasy. There is no ripple from the created world; no tremor of the pain or passion of men; nothing that appertains to the mind of men; nothing in terms of thought and feeling, of aspiration or regret. The pure lily is no more than the filthy fungus; the loftiness of mountains and depth of waters are as the flatness and mud of the river-bed. I believe in the unnameable, without shape or substance, infinite and inexpressible; one in man, plant and inanimate matter; spirit of spirit, origin of origin, form of form. I believe in the way that cannot be followed, the truth that cannot be taught, the life which is more than life. It does nothing, yet there is nothing which it does not achieve; creates all things, yet in itself is not; all worlds and systems of worlds are born in it, yet it cannot be seen or heard; in its nothingness life and death and all modes of conceivable being reside; it does not exist, yet it is home to the soul of man. It is ineffable. I therefore renounce the world. I renounce joy and pain; the vision of spring and the solemn reaping of autumn; the delight in mountain and tree, in cloudscape, in the fierce tiger, in the flight of wild geese. I renounce the pride of life and the pleasure of the body, and I renounce for ever the memory and taste of love.”

The cadences that came like waves out of the moonlit silence ceased. His visage was white and numb. One could not tell if the deep, oblong eyes were seeing or if they were blind. Did he breathe? Did the bare porcelain chest move? He might have been some hypnotic image, drowning her resentment in sleep.

But the rim of the moon came suddenly into the doorway, making a change, releasing her from a spell. It was intolerable that he should despise the memory of their intimacy, and reject all she had given him of her mind and senses. “Why, why did you kiss me that time?” she asked, in a storm of protest.

“I do not remember,” said the calm voice.

Now he seemed immensely foreign and impenetrable, as if she had been in love with a creature. Fiercely she remembered the Jupiter swan that had made love to her that first morning, in a fit of inexplicable desire. Had it been like that with Yuan? No communion of spirit at all? Her ideas about him had been fictions of the mind. The angry desire to be kissed once again by that fiction whose mouth was a spot of fire at once consumed her. She longed in a storm of resentment to wake his senses again, to see those flower-lips crumpled with the fire of passion, to see them grey with the ashes of it. But what art had she to tempt him with? Or, indeed, what art could have equalled the natural beauty of her shape, the fragile and intoxicating bloom and mystery of her person, the troubled loveliness of her mouth, of her eyes? Troubled, certainly, they were, but in them was a gleam of that unstriving and creative energy on which her lover meditated. In those subtle and moving relations between shoulder and breast, in the ineffable curves of her body, shone openly his uncreated principle from which all order and beauty proceeds.

These, maybe, were his thoughts, and evidently he perceived hers. “That which is accidental in your loveliness has no force with me. Only the eternal has force. The eternal shines in you.”

Once again, amazingly, there streamed up in her a fountain of mockery, but the icy reality of his renunciation froze her mockery at her lips. “I believe,” she said, hesitatingly—“I believe that I am more of an adept than Yuan, for I could laugh. I could laugh like old Wang and the Rishi. I am less bound to the world and to passion than Yuan if I can laugh. To renounce is to be bound by the tie of renunciation.” But no sign of emotion or any response appeared on his face, and swiftly once more she fell under the hypnotic spell of his stillness. He could not be mocked into life. She had to meet him in the reality in which he rested. “I am a woman,” she said. “I see no opposition between your unnameable and my now. Time may surely be made delicious, for the unnameable must be in time, too, and in the usage of love. It certainly is for a woman.”

“The supreme experience of the senses,” he repeated, “is the renunciation of love. The renunciation is imperfect if it is only made by the one. You have apprehended the bliss that I now experience. I brought it to your spirit, but your own nature made you capable of receiving it. Your thoughts and desires are not altogether of earth. The earth in you is earth, not of human flesh, but of the narcissus. You have eaten the mystic peach. Why cannot you therefore go all the way with me and renounce your share of what we had in the world?”

She felt a vague terror. She faltered. “Even the narcissus needs the usage of love.”

“Why do you not learn to attain the full ecstasy of contemplation in the heart of the unnameable?”

“I do not desire to sit here motionless, like a dreaming flower, without texture or colour, and receive in my dream a seed from your dream to beget a dream.”

“It is life that is a dream,” he corrected. “To dread the unnameable is to be a lost child that dreads to find home.”

“Home! You have found home ... through me!” She received illumination. “You brought me here as an excuse for renunciation, as an exercise; you used me to make your renunciation as difficult, as exquisite, and as notable as you could. And now, perhaps, some shadow of earthly passion makes you urge me to accompany you. I will not. I have a home for my spirit as well....” She broke off, for now terror snatched at her like the cold hand of death. It was the dread that he would paralyse her life and make her sit there for ever in a cold and spiritual trance. There was some unknown and compelling reason why she should escape; there was some urgent and unrecognized desire. The satisfaction of her being, she now knew, was elsewhere. With a cry she fled from that bare, moon-swept pavilion, and left the symbol of her experience staring into the moonlight.

43

Ambrose finds it difficult to decide from the recital that Lychnis gave him what was her dominant mood during the following days. There was an element she did not dwell on, but it was important—an element of incredulity, perhaps, at finding her grief supportable. We see her flitting about the woods, driven, in company with the leaves; the wind was her own bewilderment. Mostly she went with her eyes on the ground. Sometimes, no doubt, she would stamp her foot in anger for the pleasant days Yuan had ruined, and wring her hands out of helplessness. But it seems there were also days of which she tells little—days when she surprisingly lost her trouble in adoration of their splendid heedlessness. That heedlessness was a character of the universe with which she now discovered in herself a surprising affinity.

Of one critical day she told nothing at all until long after, and for some time Ambrose left blank pages in the diary. But one day he was able to fill them in.

All was turning brown in the woods. Not a green leaf of summer. Nothing but early twilight falling over the mountain hut, and sad autumn rain. Yet, oddly, she did not feel a commensurate gloom. The clouds drove across the sky, now lowering and resentful, now swift and angry, now melting in vapour of tears, now piling onward high and contemptuous. But her spirit did not answer these changes; it remained calm; it derived a satisfaction from the magnificence of the moving cloudscape; it exulted, even, in the deep and steady passion of the waterfall pouring from the wooded shoulder of a mountain, in the vast tranquillity of the high crags that floated above seas of rain. She stood in the shelter of an overhung rock—a tiny, green-robed figure in the majesty of the mountains—and examined her state of mind. Where was her grief? Washed away on the rain that swept in gusts over the distant Lake. Where was the bundle of moods that made up her troublesome self? Blown away on the winds that tore through the pines, shattered and obliterated like the leaves of summer. Had she any regret for her loneliness? She was incredulous to find that she desired no companion, that she had need of no human being. Had she any fear of the solitude of the mountains? She looked round at the wizard shapes of pine-tree and rock to see if she could frighten herself, and there was nothing in her mind but a strange, sweet, and growing exultation. All alone under the huge overhung crag she laughed her tiny insect laugh—and checked herself, for surely it was absurd that she felt no grief. But there it was, a sensation as if waves out of heaven had flowed into the body that her self, Lychnis, had vacated. Such a thing was preposterous, she decided; and pursued her way homeward, resolvedly denying the almost intolerable pleasure that invaded her. She walked with the heavy gait of one who suffers.

Then, fronting her, in a thicket by a glade, she perceived the merry, blanched face of Wang Li, peeping among brown leaves that fluttered and danced on his aged bald head. A wild fawn nuzzled in his hand. He called her, and she approached him with the demure gait of one who is sorrow-stricken, but underneath this dissembling her heart beat like a bird’s, for she seemed to be standing within the play of forces that flowed from him. Out of the corner of her eye she stole a glance at the smiling, scant-bearded visage. He was unguessably old, yet younger than the flowers that had been in the glade that April. He was full of a frightening, unhuman wisdom; on his face there played the wrinkles of a vast laughter. And unmistakably she found in herself something corresponding.

“So Yuan has abandoned you,” he said, “and you do not know where to find some relief from your temporary sorrow.”

She caught his eye. There were lightnings in it before which her dissembling vanished like silk on hot coals. She broke into peal after peal of laughter, and Wang beat his old head in an ecstasy of merriment. The fawn cropped the grass in complete indifference.

But swiftly she became grave again. “I do not understand myself,” she told him.

“It is simple enough.”

“All the same, I don’t understand why, when I was so dearly in love with Yuan....”

“In love with your left knee!”

“What do you mean then? Was I not in love?” She reflected, almost prepared, now, to believe it. “It is true, there was always a hesitation. But I can explain that.”

He doubled up with laughter.

“I really can. There was a difference of flesh between us. He was a foreigner, you see.”

The echoes of his laughter drifted to the mountains.

She was a little mortified. “It is insulting of you not to believe me. I only know that I shall never love any man again.” Now the deep pleasures of the summer came back to her heart, giving it a twist.

The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The universe itself laughed at her in his old eyes as it had rained in Yuan’s. “Let us walk,” he gasped; “let us go home.” He wiped tears from his cheeks. Then once more the beauty of it overwhelmed him. “She can never love again!” He held his sides.